Solyndra: Can’t sell it? Smash it!

Ever since Solyndra filed for bankruptcy last September, the Fremont solar company has been trying to find someone willing to buy the business. No takers have emerged so far.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

An auction for Solyndra’s office gear and spare manufacturing equipment, back in November, raised $6.2 million. Which may sound like a nice tally, until one remembers that the company owes U.S. taxpayers $528 million. Also bear in mind that Solyndra must repay $75 million to some of its private backers before the federal government gets any money back.

Now comes word from CBS 5 that Solyndra may be destroying some of the assets it hasn’t been able to sell.

The station caught workers at Solyndra smashing thousands of glass tubes that were supposed to be used in the company’s unusual solar modules, tossing the tubes into a trash bin. Unlike the typical flat solar panel, Solyndra’s modules were tube-shaped, absorbing light from multiple angles.

The station estimates that the tubes were worth more than $2 million. So why toss them? No one had bought the tubes, and the bankruptcy trustee agreed that storing them would cost more than dumping them, according to CBS 5.

Solyndra’s demise, after receiving the Obama administration’s first green-tech stimulus loan, has already become the stuff of political commercials. The glass-tube smashathon quickly caught the attention of Obama’s critics in Congress on Friday.

“Taxpayers are already on the hook for this half a billion dollar jobs program gone bad, and yet rather than try to recoup every dollar possible, the Obama administration stands by as Solyndra gets the green light to shatter millions of dollars worth of materials into oblivion,” Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns, who has been leading an investigation into Solyndra’s collapse, said in a press release Friday.